Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Yes, it's that time of the year again... it's almost Christmas, which means that I once again updated my 10 + 100 Creative Commons Christmas Songs blog article I originally wrote in 2005. That's a collection of a lot of freely downloadable, Creative Commons licensed Christmas music.

Some of the older entries in the list are no longer available unfortunately, some only needed a URL update, and I also added more than 30 new songs this year.

This currently makes a total of 256 CC Christmas songs (more will probably be added over the next few days), so head over to the full song list and get those downloads started...

(Photo: Wikipedia. Author: Malene Thyssen. License: GFDL 1.2 / CC-BY-SA 2.5)

Sooo, here's the first Christmas-related song for this year... Enjoy!

Song: the glimmer room - Christmas In Jonestown (7:18 min, 6.7 MB)
License: CC-by-nc-sa 1.0
Source: magnatune.com
Purchase from: Magnatune

Just FYI, I've updated my Playing Starcraft on Linux using Wine article from a few days ago, adding some more info about:

• Brood War installation.
• Multiplayer LAN games, firewall settings for network gaming.
• Playing Starcraft on netbooks (which works astonishingly well), tested on my One A110 VIA VX800 netbook.

Please read the updated article for details.

More neat music from ccmixter.org...

Song: hisboyelroy - Revolve (4:33 min, 8.8 MB)
License: CC-nc Sampling+ 1.0
Source: ccmixter.org
Purchase from: ?

Here's a quick intro to what I'm hacking on at university. This is a new omnidirectional robot platform we got in the lab. It's controlled via CanOpen-over-EtherCAT (which is a realtime Ethernet protocol "extension", more or less). As we don't want to deal with any of the Windows software that's usually used for such stuff, we're employing the IGH EtherCAT Master (r1549) implementation (GPL/LGPL) on Linux and it works quite nicely.

I hacked together a few shell scripts that invoke the ethercat command line tool with certain parameters to control the motor velocities "by hand", which then soon turned into a "dancing" demo of the robot ;-)

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_vF4NK26fM for the YouTube video of the dancing bot. It's just a quick (hardcoded) hack for now, there's lots of room for improvements, of course (e.g. detect baselines of random music you throw at it). The demo in the background is the fantastic Masagin by Farbrausch.

I've also hacked up a small Python script to control the robot with a Wiimote (using cwiid on Linux), which also works quite nicely. I further plan to make a small program for controlling it via a 3D mouse or the like in the future...

The longer-term plan for the robot platform is that it'll get a "backbone" and two very nice robot arms for grabbing stuff etc.